I both love and hate when I win racquetball tournaments based on the fact that only one person in my gender and division bracket shows up. It's a cheap sense of accomplishment. I guess what I'm going for here is an expensive sense of accomplishment. Close enough.

Strange, though, how this is the only sport I could see myself playing long term. I used to join sports teams for half social reasons and half I-should-get-in-shape reasons, only to discover that I dreaded practice nights, where we would run long distances (horror) do drills (at which I would suck) play out in the cold (brrr!) and then go out for drinks afterwards (yawn). Even though racquetball practice follows the exact same schedule, minus the playing out in the cold part, I look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays, where I kill myself running, crunch my core to death, then spend an hour hitting an evasive bouncy ball into the wall. Somehow, this has become fun. Fun enough that I will likely travel to Missouri in the spring (Missouri. By car. On I-70. Through Kansas) to play it against other colleges.

I woke up on Valentines Day to a box of Belgian chocolates sitting on top of my laptop. There were 18 in there yesterday morning and there are 18 in there now. Don't ask me how that is even possible. Sometimes my lack of sweet tooth astounds me, and other times I find myself hoovering up chocolate chip cookies desperately and without regard for my surroundings.

This time though... you know how sometimes something's so perfect and balanced that you don't want to thrust your hand in it and mess it up? That's what's happening here. I've got dark chocolate/cayenne pepper, white chocolate/hazelnut/orange peel, hazelnut seashells, crispy rice/hazelnut, sea salt/dark, candied ginger, dark chocolate ganache/orange peel, praline, and a mystery white chocolate snowman with a crack in his neck all lined up neatly in a box and I don't want to touch anything and ruin it.

What's the word for people with too much self control - so much self control that they miss out on fun adventures and irresponsible money-making decisions and therefore life lessons and instead just sit around eating healthy food, exercising, and saving money? Sticks-in-the-mud? Oh, yeah.

I met someone today who looks exactly like the male faces I used to draw in the margins of my notebook paper in middle school. These faces all had wide eyes, sparse lashes, button noses, very thick but perfectly groomed eyebrows, cheekbones to get lost in, expressive lips, and dark hair with widows' peaks.

I think I used to draw them because I figured if I knew what my 'perfect man' looked like, I'd be more likely to notice when he walked by. As opposed, that is, to noticing what I usually noticed, which was precisely nothing - well, except for the words on the pages in books, that is.

Well, 13 year old me, he walked by today. And I noticed. And I didn't, contrary to your likely expectations, fall all over myself, turn bright red, and write him secret Valentines notes to stick in his locker. I merely appraised him, thought, "hmm, he looks exactly like those faces I used to draw!" and went on to think some more about how different my middle school tastes were to what they are now.

That's not entirely true. I thought other things, like how precisely and delicately his face was constructed, and how strange it was that something that symmetrical existed in nature. I thought about how I would like to trace his face with a pencil, or a fingertip. His eyes were the categorical definition of hazel; how curious it was that even though I used to draw my faces in penciled graphite and white, his color of hazel was exactly how I had pictured it then.

I used to be fascinated by how it might feel to have one of those nerve disorders where you don't feel pain. As I get older, I feel pain less and less (like everyone else, I assume). Or rather, it bothers me less and less. Sometimes I'll wake up, or look over, to a bruise whose origins I can't even guess about. I have a nasty one on my knuckle I could have only gotten by smacking myself in the hand with a racquetball racquet, but you'd think that's something I would remember having done.

Also, sometimes I bite Dan on the arm what I think is lightly and he'll howl in agony and so I bite myself on the arm with the same force and I can hardly feel it. But yeah, there are teeth marks, so it must have happened.

Maybe it's because I have an increased fight-or-flight response and therefore have pain-numbing endorphins released into my blood constantly. Or not!

The most worthwhile parenthetical pursuit I can think of right now is to learn to lucid dream on command. (Parenthetical meaning, you know, something that isn't choosing a graduate school, or otherwise forging life's rocky path. Something hobby-ish.) There are so many things that I will never be able to do because of time or money constraints (visit every country in the world, go on waterslides all the time) or because these things are impossible in the physical world (fly, become a deep-sea creature) or just because I wouldn't have the wherewithal (sleep with anyone I please without any pesky rejection-related consequences). It seems a waste to have the capability to learn to do these things on command while asleep, and choose not to learn to do so. Especially since I'm starting from an easier place than most people, already lucid dreaming roughly once a month or so and remembering enough of most of my dreams to fill up a few handwritten pages.

I realize that lucid dreaming instead of going out and having real life experiences is a weak substitute, because what can happen in dreams is limited to the imagination, which in turn is limited to the experiences and knowledge it has drawn from while awake. Actually visiting a different country can create new paradigms, images, and ways of thinking, while dreaming of visiting another country really only reinforces whatever stereotypes one already holds of that country. So if the aim is to broaden, rather than to bask, lucid dreaming has failed.

However, I hold the view that basking is better than nothing (even if broadening is ultimately better than basking) and after all, it's possible to live AND dream, of course. But there are so many times in life when you're trapped somewhere, you're working and saving for something else, or just working and saving for being able to survive in the moment, and there's no time or money for vacations or even daydreaming, and you waste 8 or 9 hours sleeping and a slave to whatever insane concoction your brain cooks up for you. Why be a slave to an unknown concoction if you know what you'd rather have?

Anyway, that's why I think it's a worthwhile parenthetical pursuit. Carrying it out has not been so easy. The accepted method for going about increasing lucid dream likelihood is sometimes so comical and counterintuitive that I find myself neglecting it for weeks. It's simple, though, I'll give it that. I'm meant to ask myself, "Am I dreaming?" a bunch of times a day and then do a series of reality checks to find out. These reality checks look ridiculous to any outside observer. Pinch myself to see if it hurts. Try to point my finger through my hand. Check to see if I can read digital clocks, or a page of text, without it changing on me. Flipping light switches to see if they work.

There's a second step, involving some ritual I'm supposed to do when falling asleep, but I just can't wrap my mind around these reality checks in order to get there. The concept of asking yourself whether you're dreaming when you know you're awake just feels stupid, like, why would I ask myself something I already know the unequivocal answer to? I get the point, of course, and that is to get in the habit of asking the question so that while you're dreaming you get in the habit of doing it as well, and when you're dreaming your reality checks will, of course, fail, and there you are, lucid, pinching yourself (and probably rocketing awake)!

My first couple of attempts at lucid dreaming (distinct from those times where I just do it) have been comically conventional - exactly how you'd write it if you were to write about someone trying to dream. I realize I'm dreaming and everything starts fading. I feel like things are melting and I'm moving through maple syrup. I try to fly and I hover inches from the ground, mere gliding, while half of my vision remains in dreamland and the other half sees, stubbornly, my bedroom.

But I'm determined to do this and I will do this - bruises on my arm from constant pinching or no bruises on my arm from constant pinching.